The leader of the Civic Coalition, Donald Tusk, has achieved this Monday the support of the majority of the Polish Parliament to head the country’s next Government, as part of a center-right coalition.
The newly appointed prime minister plans to present on Tuesday a government program and a council of ministers that, after passing the vote of confidence in the Lower House, will assume full powers as soon as he takes the oath before the president, Andzej Duda, which is expected to occur on Wednesday morning.
The eight years of ultranationalist rule in Poland have come to an end. The attempts of the Law and Justice party (PiS) to seek allies to reach the parliamentary majority that the polls did not give it have failed and President Andrzej Duda has no longer been able to delay the time for change. Mateusz Morawiecki lost the investiture vote he underwent this Monday in the Sejm (Lower House).
That the PiS was not going to overcome the issue of trust was an announced chronicle, because although it was the most voted formation in last October’s elections, it lost its parliamentary majority. It only won 194 seats out of the 460 in the Sejm. Duda, who comes from PiS, commissioned Morawiecki to form a government knowing that it would fail. And with an opposition alliance already ready to assume power.
But PiS needed time and Duda gave it to them. Time to place their people in increasingly higher positions, change the rules in their favor and destroy files to make the next reform and judicial investigation more difficult, the opposition warned.
“The PiS has decided to use the last few weeks to devastate and destroy the Polish state. It is a waste of money and time and an attempt to install a fifth column of the PiS in every possible area. We will have to tackle the cleanup very quickly and with a lot of decision,” says the former president of the European Council.
The process has been quick. To speed up the official part of the change of Government, the president of the Polish Parliament, who leads one of the opposition parties that will be part of the Government coalition, modified the regulations of the Chamber so that the vote will be done by show of hands, instead of with ballots signed and deposited by hand, as until now.
In a speech before Parliament, Morawiecki made an allegation of the ultra-conservative policy of the last two legislatures, marked by social subsidies, a controversial judicial reform and the confrontation with the European Union (EU), immersed, as he said, “in a centralist process” that pursues “a Europe without homelands, instead of a Europe of homelands”.
Morawiecki’s appearance has marked the end of an eight-year period in which Poland has witnessed unprecedented political polarization and an exercise of power that is opaque to the sensitivity of a large part of Polish society, something that has been evident in Morawiecki’s inability to attract any allies to form a coalition.
The departure of PiS does not leave Tusk a free hand. Coinciding with the parliamentary session, the Polish Constitutional Court issued a ruling that does not recognize the competence of the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Warsaw. The TC, composed mostly of magistrates appointed after the controversial judicial reform of 2015 and considered, therefore, loyal to the ultra-conservative PIS government, met this Monday after postponing the hearing on numerous occasions.
The ruling considers unconstitutional the provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the parts of the EU statute that allowed Poland to be imposed two daily fines in 2021. The sanctions referred to the activities of the Polish Disciplinary Chamber, a body abolished a few months ago, and to the operation, against orders from Brussels, of the Turów mine, an open-pit coal exploitation that was denounced by the Republic. Czech due to its polluting effects
It also creates a compromising situation for Tusk, since its binding nature will prevent Poland from paying the fine imposed by the EU and this could lead to new disagreements with Brussels. Between the two fines, both of half a million euros per day, the Polish State already owes more than 600 million euros to the EU.